The inventive concept relates generally to the manufacturing of semiconductor chips. More particularly, the inventive concept relates to the process of dividing a substrate, such as a semiconductor wafer, into individual semiconductor chips.
Semiconductor chips may be manufactured by forming circuit regions including target circuits on a bare wafer, polishing a back side of the bare wafer, and cutting the polished bare wafer to separate the circuit regions from each other. The polished wafer can be cut mechanically using a saw blade, but such mechanical sawing may induce cracks in the semiconductor chips. In this case, the semiconductor chips can break while being transferred.